Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The amateur weapons of the late nineteenth century made possible the mass citizen armies that fought the American Civil War and both of this century’s world wars. Such mass armies could not be offered financial rewards for risking their lives, but they could be offered idealistic, extreme, and total goals that would inspire them to a willingness to die, and to kill: ending slavery, making a world safe for democracy, ending tyranny, spreading, or at least saving, “the American way of life,” offered such goals. But they led to a total warfare, seeking total victory and unconditional surrender. As a result, each combatant country came to feel that its way of life, or at least its regime, was at stake in the conflict, and could hardly be expected to survive defeat. Thus they felt compulsion to fight yet more tenaciously. The result was ruthless wars of extermination such as World War II.

With a continued professionalization of the armed services, caused by the increasing complexity of weapons, we may look forward with some assurance to less and less demand for total wars using total weapons of mass destruction to achieve unconditional surrender and unlimited goals. The rather naïve American idea that war aims involve the destruction of the enemy’s regime and the imposition on the defeated people of a democratic system with a prosperous economy (such as they have never previously known) will undoubtedly be replaced by the idea that the enemy regime must be maintained, perhaps in a modified form, so that we have some government with whom we can negotiate in order to obtain our more limited aims (which caused the conflict) and thus to lower the level of conflict as rapidly as possible consistent with the achievement of our aims. The nature of such “controlled conflict” will be described in a moment.

The movement toward professionalization of the armed forces and the resulting lowering of the intensity of conflict is part of a much larger process deriving from the nuclear and Superpower stalemate between the Soviet Union and the United States. The danger of nuclear destruction will continue and become, if anything, more horrifying, but will, for this very reason, become a more remote and less likely probability. In the late 1960’s the United States will have about 1,700 vehicles (missiles and SAC planes) targeted on the Soviet bloc; by the 1970’s this will rise to about 2,400. Moreover, by 1970, 650 of these will be Polaris missiles on our 41 nuclear submarines, which cannot be found and eliminated by any Soviet missile counterstrike, once they are submerged at sea. The great value of the Polaris over its land-based rivals, such as Minuteman, is that the Soviet Union knows where the latter are and can countertarget on them. This means that the MM’s must be fired out of their silos before the Soviet warheads, seeking them out to destroy them, can arrive fifteen minutes after takeoff. Such a precarious position encourages nervous anticipation and possibility of precipitate action, capable of beginning a war no one really wants. Thus, on an enormously greater scale, we have something like the von Schlieffen Plan that made it necessary for Germany to attack France in 1914 when there was no real issue justifying resort to war between them. The Polaris missiles at sea, since they cannot be found and counterforced, can be delayed, without need to strike first or even to strike second in immediate retaliation, but can be held off for hours, days, and weeks, compelling the Soviet to negotiate even after the original Soviet strike has devastated America’s cities. Thus the Soviet Union cannot win in a nuclear exchange, even if they make the first strike.

The reverse is also true. In the mid-1960’s the Soviet Union has vehicles able to deliver up to six hundred or seven hundred nuclear warheads on the United States and perhaps seven hundred or eight hundred on our European allies. Their warheads are larger than ours (with up to 100-megaton ICBM’s, while our largest are 9 MT). In spite of the fact that their missile sites are poorly organized, with missiles, fuel, crews, and warheads widely scattered, so that they are at least twelve hours from takeoff even in their fourth stage of readiness, the inaccuracy of our counterforce missiles is so great that we could not eliminate all their missiles, even if we made a first strike with no warning. It would require only about 200 Soviet warheads to devastate our cities totally, and an American strike at Soviet missile bases delivered without warning would leave almost that number not eliminated; these would be free to make a retaliatory strike at us. Moreover, the Soviets have several dozen Polaris-type submarines that can fire four missiles each from surfaced positions. Many of these would survive an American unannounced first strike.

All this means that we are as much deterred by the Soviet missile threat as they must be by our much greater threat. Such deterrence has nothing to do with the relative size of the numbers of missiles possessed by two countries. It rests on whether an unannounced first strike would leave surviving enough missiles for a retaliatory strike capable of inflicting unacceptable damage. This is now the situation on both sides, and the existence of Polaris-type missiles makes it impossible to avoid this by striving for greater numbers of missiles, for larger warheads able to obliterate wide areas, or for greater accuracy that would increase the statistical possibility of eliminating enemy missiles on first strike. Thus no one will wish to make such a strike. Possibly for this reason, about a year after the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union ceased to work on new missile bases and accepted its permanent inferiority to the United States. But the mutual veto on the use of missiles, the nuclear stalemate, remained.

This stalemate between the two Superpowers on the use of nuclear weapons also extended to their use of lesser, nonnuclear, weapons, so that the nuclear stalemate became a Superpower stalemate. This meant that much of the power of the Soviet Union and the United States, and not merely their nuclear power, was neutralized to a considerable degree, since each feared to use its nonnuclear powers for fear they might escalate into nuclear conflict. This meant that the use of nuclear tactical weapons and the use even of conventional tactical weapons were inhibited to an undetermined degree by the presence of nuclear strategic weapons no one wanted to see used. The costs of using nuclear tactical weapons are so great that it is very doubtful if they are worth the cost. For example, the Western Powers lack the conventional forces to stop any intrusion of the great masses of Soviet ground forces if these began to drive westward in an attempt to conquer Germany. The West is committed to oppose such an effort. Since it is very doubtful that the NATO forces could oppose this successfully by using only conventional weapons, there would be great pressure to use the nuclear tactical weapons that NATO forces in Europe possess. It has been estimated that the chief targets of such nuclear tactical ‘weapons would be bridges and similar narrow passages, in an effort to close these to Soviet advances. But it seems clear that if these passages were closed and the bridges destroyed, the advance of the Soviet armies (in armored and mechanized divisions) would be held up only a few weeks at most, and up to 50 million Germans would be killed from the blast-and side effects of the use of nuclear weapons. At such a cost, the Germans would probably prefer not to be defended.

In fact, it appears increasingly likely that fewer and fewer advanced people will regard large-scale war as an effective method of getting anything. What could a people obtain through war that they could not obtain with greater certainty and less effort in some other way? Indeed, the very idea of winning a general war is now almost unimaginable. We do not even know what we mean by “win.” Whatever Germany, Japan,